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Colin Brayton and Neuza Paranhos
http://static.flickr.com/23/34680565_2c5bb2edbe_m.jpg It was a pleasure for us to be invited to contribute to the Latin American bureau of Global Voices Online, where we'll be covering the exploding plastic inevitable that is the Portuguese-language blogosphere of Brazil. I was the one who introduced my wife, Neuza, a journalist from São Paulo--shown above, near our home in the Vila Madalena district of that sprawling city--to the joys of blogando. I set her up with her own domain and Movable Type installation and pointed her to Mundo Pequeno, a directly of expatriate bloggers using the Web to assuage their saudades--that quintessentially Brazilian feeling of longing for absent times, places and people--for home. Now, our daily life here in Brooklyn is full of conversation about the doings of the blogueirada, and more recently, the many astonishing developments on the political scene. We even attended Bloggercon together this year--where some blogging industry mogul hopped in the cab we had called for and left us stranded. For me--below, on our most recent vacation down South American Way--this is a chance to continue doing what I set out to do with a little blogging thought experiment called Blogalization: Blogalization is an open, distributed karass of bloggers and other independent Web writers and publishers who post in one or more languages about material discovered in one or more other languages: if I have languages A and B and you have languages B and C, we can share memes across barriers of mutual incomprehension. It was never really more than a thought experiment, as I never really had the time or talent to properly propagate the meme. When I stopped working as a freelance technical translator to accept an newspaper editorial job, in fact, most of my effort went into my work blog. The old Blogalization blog currently exists only as a MySQL database dump, in fact, waiting to be imported back into Drupal on a new domain. There, among other things, I covered the Brazilian invasion of Orkut and the scandal over alleged censorship at the Brazilian Blogger franchise licensed to O Globo, the NEWS Corporation of Brazil--a nationwide media monopoly that got its start as a propaganda organ of the dictatorship that ruled the country for 20 years. Between us, Neuza and I have a million stories from the naked Brazucosphere, and we hope you will you will enjoy our efforts to "mix bubblegum with bananas" in this space. The reference is to Jackson do Pandeiro's great samba-forró from the late 1940s, "Chiclete Com Banana": Eu só ponho bi-bop no meu samba Quando o Tio San pegar um tamburim Quando ele pegar no pandeiro e no zabumba Quando ele entender que o samba não é rumba Aí eu vou misturar Miami com Copacabana Chicletes eu misturo com banana E o meu samba vai ficar assim Quero ver a grande confusão É o samba-rock meu irmão É mas em compensação Eu quero ver o bogui ugi de pandeiro e violão Quero ver o Tio San de frigideira Numa batucada brasileira "I'll only put some be-bop in my samba if Uncle Sam picks up the carnival drum, when he learns to play the tamourine or the bass drum and realizes that samba is not the same thing as the rhumba! ..." As a Brazilian-American couple, that's always been kind of our theme song. "I really wanna see Uncle Sam marching in a carnival drum corps ..." On that note, maybe our first assignment ought to be to cull the blogs for commentary on this year's smash television hit in Brazil, a soap opera called América--which naturally has its own blog. But there are plenty of less trivial topics to cover as well: The Brazilian blogsophere is teeming with independent professional and amatuer journalists going toe to toe with the established media and sometimes getting the third degree for their troubles. In any event, we look forward to hearing from readers as well. Is it true that the streets of Rio de Janeiro are overrun with monkeys, as in the infamous Simpsons episode? No, but during our recent stay in the historic city of Ouro Preto, we did read in the newspapers of a small town in Minas Gerais being overrun by monkeys fleeing fearsome wildfires. And of course, the young Brazilian shot by police in the London Undergrounds was also from Minas Gerais. http://static.flickr.com/21/33969823_f24ea9aa73_m.jpg